Villa Pauly

The house at number 57 on the Boulevard de la Pétrusse, with its corner turrets and its air of a small Renaissance castle, was built in 1923 for a surgeon, Dr Norbert Pauly, who lived upstairs and ran his practice in the basement. He never lived in it again after the war, and neither has anyone else.

In the summer of 1940, after the invasion, the Gestapo took the villa as its headquarters for Luxembourg. Fritz Hartmann, its chief from 1941 to 1943, ran the occupation's political police from these rooms, and the cellars where the doctor had seen his patients became the place where prisoners were interrogated and tortured. Between two and three thousand Luxembourgers passed through them — resisters, people denounced by a neighbour, people who had said the wrong thing — most of them on their way to the prison in the Grund and from there to a camp: Hinzert, across the German border, first of all, and then further. For four years this address meant one thing to everyone in the city, and it still does. Villa Pauly is the name of the terror here.

After the liberation the state bought the house from Dr Pauly, who wanted nothing more to do with it, and used it for ministries — part of the Ministry of Health was here until 1999. It was listed as a national monument in 1989, and on the 23rd of October 2001 it was given the use that fits it: it is now the seat of the Comité directeur du souvenir de la Résistance and of the Centre de documentation et de recherche sur la Résistance, the archive where the history of what was done here, and of the people who fought back, is kept and studied. The plaque by the door says the rest.